Chronicles: Volume One

By Bob Dylan. Simon and Schuster, 304 pages, $24.

Boomer burnouts and pop cult cynics are likely to view Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One as the last rasp of a once-potent songwriter, one more interested in shuffling papers, penning his memoirs, and writing and starring in his 2003 semiautobiographical shaggy dog of a film, Masked and Anonymous, than in dreaming up new lyrics. You can imagine the haters miming producer Daniel Lanois, who nags Dylan during a bogged-down recording session (documented two-thirds of the way through the book), "We need songs like 'Masters of War,' 'Girl from the North Country,' or 'With God on Our Side.' " Translation: play music; we don't need no stinkin' autobios.

Still, Dylan has always thrived on the element of surprise – his frail, youthful exterior belied a tough tensile strength, an uncompromising drive to make his music, and a slippery way of subverting his own mythology – and much later, when you least expected it, he returned, close to form with 1997's Time Out of Mind and 2001's Love and Theft and live appearances that aired out antiques like "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Here, his mode of expression may be less tuneful, but as with his best songs, he grabs his audience from the start, has his own rambling, idiosyncratic, entertaining (and sometimes enlightening) way with them, and lets go on his own terms, when he's good and ready.

Dylan obviously still trusts his muse – which is only partly tamed. A reflection of the songwriter's stream-of-consciousness lyrics, his freewheeling memoir refuses to be pinned down to chronology (winking at the title itself) or a clear narrative arc. Structuring the book like a song that opens and closes on a similar musical phrase, Dylan bookends his Chronicles with rhyming scenes keyed into his initial inklings of success and meetings with his first publisher, Lou Levy, and then takes his opportunity to rove freely elsewhere: through his Cafe Wha? years as a newbie in the New York City folk scene, through his paranoid moments as a reluctant spokesperson for a generation, and through a static period as a songwriter starved for inspiration who happens to find relief in a Marin County jazz singer. It takes off on fanciful – sometimes hilarious, sometimes startling – tangents when Dylan damn well feels like it (who knew the songwriter felt such kinship with Ice-T, Johnny Rivers, and Ricky Nelson, of whom he writes, "It was like he'd been born and raised on Walden Pond where everything was hunky-dory, and I'd come out of the dark demonic woods, same forest, just a different way of looking at things."). Readers who might have shared biographers' frustrations in penetrating the protective tissue of fictions Dylan had spun around himself at various points in his career will be amazed to find themselves finally inside the songwriter's mind. And what a mind: amid the odd, intimate revelations, the pictures painted in Chronicles are clear, vivid, and whimsical, and the prose is as clean, fresh, and forceful as the songwriter's turns of phrase. And that, despite the slightly off-putting finale, which sets up readers all too clearly for the next installment, is what will compel those who haven't puzzled over the man behind the mystique to climb aboard his motorcycle for an extremely fun ride. (Kimberly Chun)

The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

By Richard Bermack. Heyday Books, 128 pages, $19.95 (paper).

"You are history. You are legend." When Dolores Ibarurri – or La Pasionaria, as the radio voice of the Spanish Republic was more widely known – spoke these words of farewell to the International Brigades in 1938, the average American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War was 28 years old. Richard Bermack's The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade tells the story of what some of them have done in the 67 years since they first became legends.

Among the 40,000 volunteers who came from 53 countries to defend the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco's military uprising were about 3,000 Americans. Of these, 800 died in Spain; most of the rest have tangled with the U.S. government ever since. In Spain they fought Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, regimes that sent Franco 50,000 troops, along with German planes to bomb the village of Guernica. For this they were labeled "premature anti-fascists."

The veterans first emerged as legends to a larger audience when 75 of them marched at the huge 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally at the Pentagon under a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner. Another banner asked President Lyndon B. Johnson, "How many Guernicas will your bombs destroy in Vietnam today?" And they kept coming – the book's front cover is a 1990 picture of the vets at an anti-Gulf War demonstration.

When the Reagan administration supported the contra insurrection against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s, VALB decided to raise funds to send down two ambulances. The veterans surprised themselves by raising enough for 20 ambulances. In recent years, attendance at VALB's annual reunion and fundraising events has ballooned, even as the number of living vets has declined to 50 or 60, demonstrating what Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman told its 1999 Oakland gathering: "Never underestimate how an exemplary life can persist in the imagination of others, how it can inspire beyond death."

Richard Bermack has combined pictures he's taken at these gatherings over the past two decades with images from the war years to create a photo history of VALB that will interest both readers who already feel a deep connection with the men and women who went to Spain's aid as well as those who might want to find out what the fuss was all about. (Tom Gallagher)

Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo

By Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama. Stone Bridge Press, 144 pages, $16.95 (paper).

I swear by the snide Harvard grads in my Let's Go travel guide, but these things aren't meant for the niche-specific tourist: they don't make, say, a Falafel Lover's Guide to New York or a Belfast for the Mural Enthusiast. Which is why Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, by Bay Guardian contributor Patrick Macias (with contributions by Tomohiro Machiyama), is the answered prayer for English-speaking anime geeks.

(Recently I was somewhere in Manhattan's East Village, failing miserably at locating a Japanese collectibles store called Toy Tokyo. "It's on, like, First or Second Avenue on the East Side," a clerk at SoHo's Kid Robot had advised. "Kinda near this shop that sells really good fries. You'll see it, no problem." Bullshit. I ended up circling the same six blocks for an hour.)

Visiting otaku, or devotees of Japanese subcultures, scouring the streets of Tokyo for Gundam model kits, cosplay cafés, and anime-inspired dolls with functional genitalia now have their travel bible. Catering to diverse otaku types, the guide surveys nine playing fields: manga, toys, idols, anime, games, movies, cosplay (think "costume" and "player"), comiket (the Burning Man for comic fans), and pla-mo ("plastic models"). Macias writes helpful introductions for each section and broadens his store reviews with interesting – sometimes disquieting – bios of famous otaku. Anecdotal interviews and clueless-in-Japan-type narratives also give you plenty to read on subway rides between collector-friendly venues. When you get sick of the merchandise, consult Cruising for directions to your favorite "anime locations." If you've been searching all your life for the Shibuya 109 shopping monolith in The Vision of Escaflowne (yup, Episode Eight), you've found your I Ching. (Dave Kim)